MISSED PART I ?
Follow the link above to read about who can bond,
and the Trials they have to overcome for a chance at it.

The Convergence Ceremony

The convergence happens twice a year, when atmospheric conditions align in ways the clans still don’t fully understand. Something about pressure patterns. Something about the way storm-charged crystals throughout the mountains resonate together. Something about the lingering traces of the Separation’s atmospheric magic concentrating in specific high-altitude locations.

The clans can predict the convergence seasons—late spring and early autumn—but the exact timing varies by days or even weeks. Storm-callers monitor the conditions obsessively. Weather-readers watch for the telltale signs. Everyone waits.

And then, suddenly, the air changes. Pressure drops. Crystal formations throughout the peaks begin to hum with harmonic resonance. The boundary between human and draconic consciousness becomes… permeable. Thin. Ready.

The convergence grounds are natural amphitheaters at extreme altitude, enhanced over centuries with careful clan stonework that focuses atmospheric energies without disrupting the natural flow. Each clan maintains at least one. Some ancient sites are shared between clans during the critical bonding seasons—neutral ground where young dragons and trained resonants can gather without political complications.

This is where dragons and humans choose each other.

---

The Gathering

The unbonded dragons arrive first.

They come from throughout the mountains—young dragons who’ve reached maturity, older dragons who’ve never bonded, dragons who lost partners and healed enough to consider trying again. They circle the convergence ground in a dance that looks chaotic but follows patterns only they understand, assessing the atmospheric conditions, greeting each other in harmonics humans can’t quite hear.

They’re nervous. Dragons don’t often admit this, but bonded riders report sensing it through their established connections: the unbonded ones are hoping and hesitant in equal measure. Wondering if this convergence will bring them a partner. Worried that they’ll recognize no one. Curious about the strange little primates waiting below.

The trained resonants arrive at dawn, when the light is golden and the air is coldest. They stand in a loose grouping at the heart of the amphitheater, watching the dragons wheel overhead, trying to project calm they don’t feel.

Clan elders and bonded pairs observe from the edges. They won’t interfere—the choice must be made freely by both parties—but they’re present for support, for emergency intervention if something goes wrong, and to witness. Every bonding is celebrated. Every bond that forms is a gift to the entire clan.

The atmosphere feels charged. Electric. Every breath tastes like possibility.

And then the first dragon descends.

---

The First Touch

There’s no protocol for who approaches first. Sometimes a dragon lands and waits to see which human steps forward. Sometimes a human walks to the center of the amphitheater and looks up, hoping. Sometimes dragon and human move simultaneously, as if pulled by the same instinct.

The approach is careful. Tentative. Both parties are aware this might end in nothing—polite acknowledgment that they aren’t compatible, a respectful withdrawal, trying again with someone else.

Or it might end in everything.

The human usually extends a hand. Palm up, fingers relaxed. An offer, not a demand. The dragon extends their head, massive and scaled and ancient, bringing one eye level with the small figure before them.

They touch.

And if they’re compatible—if their minds recognize each other across every difference of species and perception and lived experience—the bond begins.

---

What It Feels Like

Every bonded rider describes the first touch differently, but certain themes repeat:

“Like drowning in sky.”

“My mind turned inside out while something vast poured in.”

“I wasn’t just feeling their thoughts—I was being them, while still being myself.”

“Everything I thought I knew about consciousness was wrong.”

“It hurt. It was beautiful. I couldn’t tell the difference.”

The initial connection is overwhelming. You’re suddenly experiencing sensory input your human brain isn’t designed to process: draconic vision that perceives atmospheric pressure as color, temperature as texture, air currents as visible rivers of motion. You’re feeling emotions that don’t have human names—concepts that don’t translate—time perception that moves at dragon scale where decades feel like seasons.

Your neural pathways are beginning to reshape themselves to accommodate an alien consciousness. Your brain is literally forming new structures on the fly, creating dedicated channels for the connection, establishing protocols for sharing awareness without losing your individual identity.

This is why the convergence ceremony requires specific atmospheric conditions. The magic in the air—the water-based power that permeates all of Dimidium—acts as a kind of cushion. A facilitator. It makes the initial synchronization possible without immediately destroying the human mind from the shock.

Without it, the first touch would be like plugging your nervous system directly into a lightning strike.

With it, the connection forms gradually enough that your brain can adapt in real-time. Can stretch to contain something it was never designed to hold. Can begin the transformation from individual consciousness to shared partnership.

Dragons experience the shock too. Human thought patterns are alien to them—rapid, chaotic, emotional in ways that don’t map to draconic experience. The human sense of urgency, the brief lifespan, the social complexity and political maneuvering all hit dragon consciousness like sensory overload.

But if the compatibility is genuine, both minds begin to find the rhythm. The pattern underneath the chaos. The harmony in the discord.

That’s when you know the bond will take.

---

Failed Connections

Not every first touch leads to bonding.

Sometimes a dragon and human touch, and there’s simply nothing. No resonance. No recognition. It’s like meeting someone at a gathering and realizing you have nothing in common—polite, slightly awkward, but not catastrophic.

Both parties withdraw carefully. The human tries again with another dragon. The dragon returns to the circling dance overhead, waiting for a different possibility.

This is normal. Expected. Most resonants touch several dragons before finding their match. Most dragons assess multiple humans before sensing compatibility.

But sometimes the failure is worse.

Sometimes minds touch and discover they’re actively incompatible—not neutral, but discordant. The neural patterns clash rather than harmonize. The attempt to synchronize causes pain, disorientation, and occasionally, brief cognitive disruption for both parties.

The convergence grounds maintain specialized chambers for these situations. Small rooms carved into the stone, lined with storm-charged crystals that help minds separate cleanly after a failed connection. Healers trained to recognize the symptoms of dangerous incompatibility and intervene before permanent damage occurs.

Most incompatible connections separate naturally within seconds, leaving both parties shaken but unharmed. But the possibility of real damage is why the testing protocol exists. Why only resonants attend convergence ceremonies. Why the clans take neural compatibility so seriously.

A truly catastrophic failure—where minds try to force a bond despite fundamental incompatibility—can destroy cognitive function in both human and dragon. The early generations learned this the hard way. Now the protocols protect everyone.

Even so, every resonant standing at convergence knows the risk they’re taking. And they choose it anyway.

---

When It Works

Ryn describes his first touch with Kivith like this:

“I put my hand on his scales and the world opened. Not gently. Like a door blown off its hinges in a storm. Suddenly I wasn’t just feeling wind—I was understanding it at every scale simultaneously. The tiny eddies around my fingertips. The massive pressure systems moving across the mountains. The individual water droplets in distant clouds. All of it at once.

“And underneath that, I felt him. Young. Curious. Amused by my confusion. Patient in ways I’d never experienced patience before. He’d been watching me for three years, he told me—well, not told exactly, because there weren’t words yet, just impressions and emotions—and he’d been waiting for me to be old enough to reach back.

“I thought I was ready. I’d trained for six years. I’d studied everything they could teach me. But nothing prepares you for the moment when another consciousness just… moves into your mind and settles there like it’s always belonged.

“It hurt. It was terrifying. And I never wanted it to stop.”

That’s when the convergence ceremony achieves its purpose. When dragon and human recognize each other not as alien consciousness to study, but as partner. As the mind that fits beside yours. As the missing piece you didn’t know you were lacking until the moment it clicked into place.

The first touch establishes the initial connection. But the bond itself forms gradually over weeks and months and years, as neural pathways solidify and strengthen and become permanent structures neither partner could survive losing.

Which is exactly what happens next.

So the dragons have descended. The first touches have happened. Some humans stand alone, still hoping. Some walk away with tears on their faces, knowing this convergence wasn’t theirs. And some—

Some stand with their hands on dragon scales, eyes wide with overwhelm, feeling another consciousness settle into the spaces of their mind.

The bond has begun.

Now comes the transformation—the weeks and months and years where two separate beings slowly, painfully, beautifully merge into something neither could be alone.

The Transformation Process

The convergence ceremony is just the beginning. The moment of first touch establishes compatibility—proves that your minds can synchronize. But the actual bond forms gradually over weeks, months, and years as your brain literally restructures itself to accommodate another consciousness.

This isn’t metaphor. The neural changes are physical, measurable, and irreversible.

Bonded riders who’ve allowed Guild researchers to study their brain structure show dedicated neural pathways that don’t exist in non-bonded humans. Clusters of neurons firing in synchronized patterns with their dragon partners even when separated by distance. Physical changes in brain chemistry and structure that enable capabilities human neurology shouldn’t support.

The transformation happens in stages. Each one builds on the last. Each one changes you in ways you can’t undo.

---

Week One: The Initial Bridge

The first week after convergence is, universally, described as the hardest.

Your brain is attempting to contain something it wasn’t designed to hold. You’re processing sensory input from two completely different nervous systems simultaneously. Your sense of “self” keeps blurring into “other” and you have to consciously work to remember which thoughts are yours and which are your dragon’s.

The headaches are spectacular. Constant. Pounding. Like your skull is too small for what’s happening inside it.

You’re disoriented. Clumsy. You reach for a cup and misjudge the distance because your depth perception is trying to process both human binocular vision and draconic atmospheric sensing at the same time. You walk into walls because your proprioception is confused about the size and shape of your body—are you five feet tall or fifty? Do you have arms or wings?

Sleep becomes difficult because your dragon doesn’t sleep the way you do. Their rest cycles are longer and lighter, periods of reduced activity rather than true unconsciousness. When you try to sleep, you’re still partially aware through their consciousness—feeling the wind, sensing pressure changes, experiencing a wakefulness that won’t let you fully rest.

Communication at this stage is crude. Simple thought transmission. Basic emotional awareness. Your dragon is learning human language and social concepts. You’re learning to perceive atmospheric patterns as information rather than just weather. You’re both struggling to distinguish individual identity from shared consciousness.

The physical manifestations begin during week one. For humans, the telltale silver-white streaks appear in your hair—usually around the temples first, then spreading. Your weather sensitivity increases dramatically. You can feel pressure changes in your bones, sense coming storms hours before they arrive, perceive temperature gradients like visible layers in the air.

For dragons, subtle scale pattern changes appear around their eyes and along the neural pathways that connect to their primary sensory processing. The changes are barely visible at first—slight variations in iridescence, patterns that catch light differently—but bonded dragons can identify each other by these marks.

The clan provides support during this first week. Other bonded pairs help you learn to separate your thoughts. Healers monitor for signs of dangerous neural stress. Your flight circle—if you’ve been assigned to one—begins the process of integration, helping your dragon understand clan social structures and helping you learn to navigate shared consciousness.

You don’t leave the clan settlement during week one. The adjustment is too difficult, the disorientation too profound. You need support, supervision, and the assurance that what you’re experiencing is normal—even though it feels catastrophic.

Everyone tells you it gets easier. You don’t believe them. You can’t imagine how this chaos could ever feel natural.

But then, gradually, your brain adapts.

---

Months Two Through Six:
Deep Binding

By the second month, the constant headaches fade to occasional sharp pains. You’re learning to toggle between your consciousness and your dragon’s rather than experiencing both at full intensity simultaneously. The disorientation lessens. You can walk without crashing into things.

This is when the real bond formation accelerates.

Neural pathways that formed chaotically in week one begin to organize themselves into efficient structures. Your brain develops dedicated regions for processing draconic sensory input. Your dragon’s mind creates corresponding structures for understanding human social complexity and language nuance. The connection deepens from basic thought transmission to genuine sensory sharing.

You start experiencing flight through your dragon’s perception. Not just seeing what they see—being in their body, feeling wind resistance against scales, sensing thermal currents as physical pressure, understanding altitude as a three-dimensional awareness that human bodies can’t naturally achieve. When they fly, you fly. When they dive, your stomach drops even though your human body is standing on the ground.

Your dragon begins understanding human emotion with new depth. They’ve always been intelligent, but human feelings are rapid and complex and layered in ways draconic emotion isn’t. Through the bond, they start comprehending subtle social cues. Political maneuvering. The nuances of human relationships. Things that once seemed baffling start making sense.

The “shared mental space” forms during these months—a kind of neutral ground where your consciousness and your dragon’s can meet without either one dominating. It’s not physical. It’s not quite telepathy. It’s closer to a persistent dream space that you both inhabit, where communication happens through impression and emotion and sensation rather than words.

Bonded pairs describe the shared space differently. Some experience it as a storm system they both move through. Others as a vast sky. Others as a resonant chamber where their thoughts echo between them. The specific manifestation varies, but the function is the same: a place where two minds can merge without either one losing individual identity.

The emotional resonance deepens during deep binding, but—and this is crucial—you maintain emotional autonomy. Your dragon’s feelings don’t override yours. Their grief doesn’t erase your joy. Instead, you experience their emotions as “weather” in the shared mental space. You feel them without being consumed by them. You respond with empathy but maintain your own emotional core.

This is what distinguishes a healthy bond from a dangerous one. If the emotions aren’t separable—if you can’t tell where your feelings end and your dragon’s begin—that’s a sign something went wrong during initial bonding. Most bonds don’t reach this stage if the compatibility wasn’t genuine, but occasionally a pair makes it to month two or three before realizing the merger is too complete, the boundaries too blurred.

Those bonds have to be carefully severed before permanent damage occurs. It’s rare. Traumatic for both parties. But necessary.

For most bonded pairs, though, these months bring increasing comfort in shared consciousness. You start to trust the connection. To rely on it. To realize that your dragon’s presence in your mind isn’t an invasion—it’s companionship at a level you didn’t know was possible.

You’re also learning to work together. If you’re in a flight circle, you’re practicing coordinated flying. Basic weather-working. The physical synchronization that allows your dragon’s power and your human precision to combine into something neither could achieve alone.

By month six, the bond feels stable. You can’t imagine existence without your dragon beside you—or rather, within you. The constant awareness of their consciousness has become as natural as your own heartbeat.

But you’re still just beginning.

---

Years One Through Two: Stabilization and Specialization

The first two years of bonding are when you discover what kind of partnership you’ve formed.

All bonds grant enhanced weather sensitivity and basic atmospheric manipulation. All bonded pairs can share thoughts and emotions. All experience the merged consciousness during flight. But beyond those commonalities, each bond develops unique characteristics based on the specific compatibility between partners.

Storm Bonds emerge most commonly. These partnerships emphasize direct atmospheric manipulation—the ability to shape weather patterns, call or calm storms, redirect wind and precipitation. Storm-bonded riders develop the most dramatic physical changes: their silver-white hair streaks become pronounced, often covering most of their hair by the end of year two. They can perceive weather patterns with extraordinary precision, sensing storm formation days before it’s visible to others.

Kivith and Ryn formed a storm bond. Ryn describes the moment he first successfully called lightning as “understanding that the storm and I were speaking the same language—and I’d finally learned enough words to ask it to dance.”

Memory Bonds are rarer and more challenging. These connections grant the human access to their dragon’s ancestral memories—not complete recall, but impressions and knowledge passed down through draconic lineages spanning thousands of years. Memory-bonded riders become clan historians and knowledge-keepers, maintaining cultural continuity in ways no written record could match.

But accessing dragon memory comes with psychological strain. Dragon time perception operates at completely different scales than human consciousness. Processing memories that span centuries, experiencing events from perspectives that don’t align with human sensory frameworks, holding knowledge of losses that occurred before your grandparents were born—it’s cognitively exhausting. Memory-bonded riders need extensive support and training to avoid becoming overwhelmed by information their human minds struggle to contextualize.

Flight Bonds emphasize perfect physical coordination between partners. These pairs develop enhanced reflexes, superior vision adapted for high-altitude aerial perception, and almost precognitive awareness of each other’s movements. They’re the aerial dancers of the clans, the defenders who can outmaneuver storms and threats through sheer synchronized precision.

Flight-bonded riders often serve in defensive roles, protecting clan territory from Guild incursions or natural threats. Their physical changes are subtle but significant: they develop enhanced proprioception, faster reaction times, and the ability to process spatial information with almost superhuman speed.

Voice Bonds are extraordinarily rare—perhaps one per generation across all the clans combined. These connections allow communication with dragons beyond the bonded pair. Voice-bonded riders can translate between draconic and human communication styles, mediate disputes between dragon and human clan members, and sometimes even facilitate communication between dragons who’ve chosen not to bond.

The physical manifestation of voice bonds is distinctive: the rider’s vocal patterns change, acquiring harmonic overtones that sound almost musical. Some develop the ability to produce sounds outside normal human vocal range. Dragons bonded to voice riders show corresponding changes in their communication patterns, becoming more readily understood by non-bonded humans.

The specific bond type isn’t determined by choice or training. It emerges from the fundamental compatibility between partners—the way your minds synchronize, the neural pathways that develop most strongly, the natural strengths of your combined consciousness. You discover your bond type gradually as certain abilities manifest more readily than others.

By the end of year two, you know what you are together. You’ve found your role in the clan. You’ve learned to work with your specific strengths and limitations. The bond feels stable, permanent, essential.

You think you understand what partnership means.

Then you reach the deep years, and you learn you were wrong.

---

Years Five Through Ten:
The Shared Skies

Somewhere between the fifth and tenth year of bonding, something shifts.

The connection that required conscious effort to maintain becomes unconscious. The shared mental space that you had to deliberately enter becomes accessible at will—or sometimes involuntarily, when emotions run high or danger triggers automatic synchronization. The boundaries between your consciousness and your dragon’s become permeable in ways they weren’t before.

Bonded riders call this stage “the shared skies,” and most struggle to explain it to outsiders.

It’s not that you lose individual identity. You remain yourself. Your dragon remains themselves. But you develop the ability to merge temporarily into a unified consciousness that’s neither human nor draconic but genuinely both.

During these moments of complete merger, you don’t just perceive through your dragon’s senses—you are your dragon. You feel the wind resistance against scales as your own skin. You experience the joy of flight as if you’d been born to the sky. You understand atmospheric patterns with an intimacy that goes beyond sensing or knowing—you are the storm, at least partially, for brief moments of perfect unity.

Your dragon simultaneously experiences human consciousness with equal depth. They feel your emotional complexity. Your artistic sensibilities. Your appreciation for beauty and story and connection. Things that seemed alien to draconic perspective become temporarily natural through the merger.

This isn’t possession. Neither consciousness dominates the other. It’s more like two instruments playing the same piece of music so precisely that the sound becomes indistinguishable—you can’t tell where one melody ends and the other begins, but both remain essential to the harmony.

The shared skies enable the most sophisticated forms of weather-working. When you and your dragon merge consciousness during atmospheric manipulation, you combine human precision with draconic power in ways that make complex weather patterns navigable. You can thread through storms that would kill other riders, shape air currents with surgical accuracy, or calm atmospheric chaos through perfect synchronized intervention.

But the shared skies also make loss devastating.

When you’ve spent years learning to merge consciousness with another being, your sense of self becomes inextricably linked to their presence. The bond isn’t just emotional connection or convenient magic—it’s fundamental to your cognitive architecture. Your brain has restructured itself around another consciousness. Your dragon has done the same.

Which is why, when one partner dies, the survivor rarely lasts long as they are.

---

What the Bond Becomes

By year ten, you can barely remember what solitude felt like. Your dragon’s consciousness has been beside yours—within yours—for so long that the idea of existing without them seems impossible. Not tragic. Not painful. Literally impossible, like trying to breathe without lungs or think without a brain.

You’ve developed capabilities neither species could achieve alone. Your human precision shapes their draconic power. Their atmospheric instinct guides your technical interventions. Together, you can accomplish weather-working that seems like magic but is actually the result of perfect partnership.

You’ve learned to navigate two completely different perspectives on existence. You understand time at both human and draconic scales—the urgency of brief years, the patience of centuries. You experience emotion with human depth and draconic constancy. You perceive reality through doubled senses that show you dimensions other people can’t access.

You’re not just human anymore. But you’re not dragon either.

You’re bonded. And that’s something unique in all of Dimidium—a merger of consciousness that creates something neither species could be alone.

The clans understand this. They celebrate it. They build their entire society around supporting these partnerships because they recognize what’s gained through the bond.

But they also acknowledge what it costs.

So what exactly do both species gain from this partnership? What makes the bond worth the neural restructuring, the loss of solitude, the eventual grief?

Let’s talk about the gifts—and then, honestly, the costs.